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Core State Standards for Education in America.

Using LibGuide
to Recognize Fake News

Lesley
Farmer
Professor of Library Media
California State University (CSU) Long Beach

Fake News Is Now
Ubiquitous

Fake news remains a hot topic, and this kind of
information will continue to be created and read. One difference now
is that fake news can become viral, especially through social media.
Fake news often spreads faster than truth, and almost a quarter of
Facebook users have shared fake news, sometimes unwittingly.
According to Ipsos’ 2016 poll, 75% of people get fooled by fake news
(Silverman & Siger-Vine, 12/6/2016).

Remember Pizzagate? What about the Vatican City
getting sold? Was the moon landing a hoax?

Probably you recognize all of these “events” as
fake news. Some fake news is harder to discern: Has Pluto been
officially reclassified as a planet? Did the NFL admit to rigging
games? Going back in time a bit, think about an 1835 newspaper
article about mammals living on the moon.

The best “vaccine” against fake news is
education in information literacy and digital
citizenship. Such education can start as early as
preschool when parents can help their children tell the difference
in TV ads between a toy that flies by itself or is held in the air
by a person. History is filled with fake news, e.g., 1849 news that
“California streams are lined with gold!” Teachers in their classes
and parents at home can use these examples to foster student
critical thinking. Pseudoscience can be examined by experiments.
Misleading statistics can be analyzed in math classes. And
librarians are especially good at detecting and revealing fake news.

I believe that all teachers at all levels have
the responsibility of helping students learn to identify fake news
and incorrect content that is being taught to them in and outside of
school. But finding appropriate sources can be time-consuming. To
that end, I have created a LibGuide on fake news (Farmer, n.d.).
While the core audience is high school and college education, the
website, which is available free under a Creative Commons License,
can be used by all teachers and parents to help students learn how
to detect and deal with fake news.

The LibGuide

The LibGuide links to articles, lessons, PowerPoint presentations,
videos, and infographics that deal with fake news and related
literacies: news literacy, media literacy, visual literacy, digital
literacy, information literacy, and numeracy/data literacy. The home
page shows a useful infographic about ten types of misleading news,
from clickbait to propaganda. Among other related resources, the
background page links to the Museum of Hoaxes, which includes fake
news from the middle ages onward, as well as a gallery of
photographic hoaxes. There are more than a dozen videos on fake
news: how it spreads, why our brains love it, how to spot it, the
role of media, and how to choose your news. One video is an
interviewer with a creator of fake news, who is both compelling and
horrifying. The website also links to several fact-checking tools,
so students can learn how to become “professional” Fact Checkers
(which sounds a lot more enticing than learning how to evaluate
websites). Additionally, the linked handbook Web
literacy for student fact-checkers teaches valuable critical
thinking skills and habits.

The LibGuide contains links to twenty curricula
about fake news and associated libraries. That section also includes
a few PowerPoint presentations (including a “one-shot” lesson) and
provides a more extensive fake news curriculum for high
school/college. The section also includes advice about issues and
strategies for teaching about fake news.

It is also possible to start with a single fake
news learning activity like taking a quiz such as Factitious to test
one’s ability to spot fake news (it’s harder than you think!) – and
learn how the news was faked. Because fake news discernment
incorporates several types of literacies (news, media, visual,
digital, data), the guide offers learning activities about fake new,
focusing on each literacy. For instance, Mind over Media shows
different kinds of propaganda; the viewer can rate each item’s
veracity and its impact – and compare ratings with other people’s.

Other sections deal with civic engagement and
digital citizenship: how to address fake news. Interestingly, youth
who use social media are more likely to be engaged civicly, so
channeling their interest and building their public discourse skills
– as well as critical analysis – can lead to positive social change.
Among the civics education learning activities are interactive games
such as iCivics and PolitiCraft. Also listed are websites for
youth-generated civic initiatives such as TakingITGlobal and
Students Voices Campaign.

More personally, education in recognizing fake
news can be shared by friends and family. What does one do? There’s
a section on combatting and fixing fake news. The short answer is:
don’t point out the person’s errors, but rather give a counter story
or example; expose the person to different perspectives. It can help
break the filter bubble – or at least help people become aware that
they might be in a filter bubble.

This LibGuide can be used in several ways:
sharing the one-shot presentation for the academic community or one
of its constituents, using or adapting the fake news curriculum as a
stand-alone set of lessons or in collaboration with classroom
teachers as a unit. The various single lessons can also be
interspersed in existing curriculum; librarians can refer teachers
to the lessons and LibGuide, or can collaborate with them as
teachers are co-planning a learning activity with the librarian. The
videos are also good attention getters, and the LibGuide lists most
of them in one section, so they can be used in a faculty meeting or
as a “teaser” on the library web portal.

Fake news crosses academic disciplines, so can
be integrated into the curriculum in several ways: in science as
pseudo-science discussions, in history as actual examples and
consequences from the past, in health and PE to address body image
and dangerous health advice, in math to discern misleading and false
statistics, in art in terms of visual literacy and image editing,
and in English lessons about rhetoric.

Learning about fake news can take as little as
one hour, e.g., the one-shot fake news essentials PowerPoint, or a
simple learning activity. On the other hand, a whole course can
address fake news. Every election and every “discovery” is another
opportunity to hone fake news skills. Frankly, news literacy is a
lifelong learning activity as the news and formats change. This fake
news LibGuide can serve as a reference source to inspire engaging
and important learning.

I (David Moursund) just could not resist adding
my personal Fake News tidbit to this IAE Newsletter. The
April 1988 issue of The Computing Teacher (a periodical
that I started in 1973 and edited for many years) contained my
editorial that was actually an April Fool’s joke. It discussed a
new, highly secret computer system being used by the U.S. military.
The last paragraph of the article says:

Next, I asked about
some of the technical specifications of the hardware and I asked
what programming language was being used to develop the software. I
guess that the general standing there rather intimidated the
technical person, as the response was quite guarded. But I was told
that the hardware is called the All Purpose Relatively Intelligent
Learner (APRIL) computer since it makes extensive use of recent
advances in artificial intelligence. The language used to write the
software is called the First Operational Optical Language (FOOL).

Here is a Retrospective Comment I published
in the April 2002 The Computing Teacher:

This editorial was
first published in the April 1988 issue of The Computing
Teacher. This was my first attempt to write an April Fool's
editorial. Several of my students read only part of it, and then
quoted it in assignments that they turned in to me. I heard stories
that others had done the same thing. They completely missed the
point that it was a joke, and so quoted it as representing what
exists right now. A number of other people noted that the ideas in
the article were really not very far into the future. My conclusion
was that I should probably give up on writing April Fool's
editorials.

Dr. Lesley Farmer,
Professor at California State University (CSU) Long Beach,
coordinates the Librarianship program, and was named as the
university’s Outstanding Professor. She also manages the CSU ICT
Literacy Project. She earned her M.S. in Library Science at the
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and received her doctorate
in Adult Education from Temple University. Dr. Farmer chaired the
IFLA’s School Libraries Section, and is a Fulbright scholar. A
frequent presenter and writer for the profession, she won American
Library Association’s Phi Beta Mu Award for library education, the
AASL Distinguished Services Award, and the International Association
of School Librarianship Commendation Award. Dr. Farmer’s research
interests include digital citizenship, information literacy, and
data analytics. Her most recent books are Library Improvement
through Data Analytics (ALA, 2016) and Managing the
Successful School Library (ALA, 2017).

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